When Texas Representative Steve Stockman announced he would run for the U.S. Senate, back in December, pundits girded for a doozy of a fight. The senator who Stockman was challenging in the Republican primary, John Cornyn, had a Tea Party target on his back for his lack of enthusiasm for last fall's government shutdown and for failing to embrace the Tea Party as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee back in 2010. Stockman's public persona has long been more Internet troll than public servant—he had campaign bumper stickers that read, "If babies had guns they wouldn't be aborted"; recently, his spokesman responded to Karl Rove's support for Cornyn by observing, "Karl Rove looks like an elderly baby." Yet, as a two-term member of Congress, Stockman was more qualified on paper than the Tea Party Senate nominees of yore (remember semi-professional Bill Maher guest Christine O'Donnell?).

In the past, these ingredients—a right-wing gadfly without portfolio plus an incumbent who toed the Washington line—were all that was needed for an incumbent-rousting Tea Party win. But that's not how the Texas primary went down. Stockman ran a bizarre campaign, barely raising money or making public appearances. His strategy seemed to consist of his weird tweets and a bunch of possibly illegal newspaper-style campaign mailers. It was enough to make one wonder if perhaps his whole "political" "career" was an Andy Kaufman-style performance-art piece, a meditation on the nature of representation and the ontology of assault rifles. Cornyn, meanwhile, tacked hard to the right, straining to emulate his junior partner in the Texas delegation, Senator Ted Cruz, winner of the hardest-fought Tea Party-vs.-Establishment battle of 2012. (Cruz, despite being an official of the senatorial committee, refused to endorse Cornyn.)

Most national and Texas Tea Party groups steered clear of Stockman's off-the-rails crazy train. And on Tuesday night, in the first installment of 2014's Republican-on-Republican series, Cornyn trounced him. Cornyn took almost 60 percent of the vote to Stockman's less than 20 percent.

Given the dynamics of the Cornyn contest, it's a mistake to read it as a simple parable of the GOP establishment notching a victory over the ornery Tea Party.

Given the dynamics of the Cornyn contest, it's a mistake to read it as a simple parable of the GOP establishment notching a victory over the ornery Tea Party. Instead, it's a story about how the Tea Party got smart and learned to pick its battles. Just two weeks ago, Erick Erickson, the editor of the prominent conservative blog RedState, was calling Cornyn a "coward." But on Tuesday, Erickson tweeted his approval of Cornyn's win: "Well, conservatives dodged a bullet in Texas," he wrote. "Some Senators are not worth primarying." Four years after the Tea Party began staging primary upsets seemingly indiscriminately, this recognition represents a major change.

And right-wing fervor is far from dead in Texas, as the results further down the ballot showed. Sure, the Tea Party-backed challenge to incumbent Representative Pete Sessions failed by a 2-to-1 margin. But the incumbent lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, was running a distant second to a conservative talk-show host, Dan Patrick. Poor David Dewhurst: Two years ago, he was the odds-on favorite to be Texas's next U.S. senator. Then he got knocked out by a political newcomer named Ted Cruz, and now he's fighting just to keep his current second-fiddle job. In a recent debate, all four lieutenant-governor candidates opposed legalizing undocumented immigrants, endorsed the teaching of creationism in public schools, and decried a judge's recent decision to take a brain-dead pregnant woman off life support. Since neither candidate got 50 percent of the vote, Patrick and Dewhurst will meet again in a May runoff.

In the Republican primary for agriculture commissioner, the candidate endorsed by the Texas Farm Bureau and baseball legend Nolan Ryan was polling dead last of four candidates, while a former state legislator under ethics investigation who'd claimed the Tea Party mantle took the top spot. (This is an especially interesting result if you've followed the declining clout of agricultural interests in the GOP, as I have.) That race, too, will be decided in a runoff.

Meanwhile, 90-year-old Representative Ralph Hall, the oldest sitting member in House history, was forced into a runoff by a challenger who argued it was time for new blood but did not call himself a Tea Partier. Hall, a former Democrat, recently declared himself "healthy as a radish" and once told Mitt Romney he liked Mormons because they "give me those airplane bottles of booze when we’re on a flight." George P. Bush, the fourth-generation heir to the Bush political dynasty (he's George W.'s nephew and Jeb's son), is poised to claim his first elected office after decisively winning his primary for the powerful statewide post of land commissioner. And both parties' gubernatorial candidates, Democrat Wendy Davis and Republican Greg Abbott, sailed through their lightly contested primaries.

Primaries in North Carolina, Nebraska, and Kentucky will better test whether the Tea Party still has the juice to surprise the GOP establishment.

Given the turmoil that has roiled the Republican Party in recent years, primary season is of major importance as an indicator of which party faction has the upper hand. There's reason to believe the GOP rank and file's ardor has cooled for Tea Party-style incumbent-hunts, especially the kind that lose general elections. Stockman's flameout shows that the movement is now sophisticated enough to critically evaluate the candidates who seek to bear its standard, and reject the ones who are egregiously loony. But upcoming primaries in states like North Carolina, Nebraska, and Kentucky will better test whether the Tea Party still has the juice to surprise the Republican establishment.

A national GOP strategist who works with conservative candidates predicted to me that 2014 will yet turn out to be a banner year for the Tea Party: In Nebraska, he predicted a victory for Ben Sasse, who claims the most Tea Party support. Kentucky, where Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell faces a challenge from the right, "is going to be closer than people think." In Mississippi, Tea Party challenger Chris "McDaniel is going to win. And I will be very interested in what $500,000 of negative ads does to Pat Roberts," the Kansas senator trying to protect his right flank from a radiologist distantly related to President Obama.

All these results, if they come to pass, would show a Tea Party as vibrant and hungry as it was 2010—contrary to the "Tea Party loses in Texas" headlines that were ubiquitous Tuesday. "And the establishment and the press," the strategist added, "will be shocked every step of the way."

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His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

“All the world has failed us,” a resident of the Syrian city of Aleppo told the BBC this week, via a WhatsApp audio message. “The city is dying. Rapidly by bombardment, and slowly by hunger and fear of the advance of the Assad regime.”

In recent weeks, the Syrian military, backed by Russian air power and Iran-affiliated militias, has swiftly retaken most of eastern Aleppo, the last major urban stronghold of rebel forces in Syria. Tens of thousands of besieged civilians are struggling to survive and escape the fighting, amid talk of a rebel retreat. One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, the city of the Silk Road and the Great Mosque, of muwashshah and kibbeh with quince, of the White Helmets and Omran Daqneesh, is poised to fall to Bashar al-Assad and his benefactors in Moscow and Tehran, after a savage four-year stalemate. Syria’s president, who has overseen a war that has left hundreds of thousands of his compatriots dead, will inherit a city robbed of its human potential and reduced to rubble.

Even in big cities like Tokyo, small children take the subway and run errands by themselves. The reason has a lot to do with group dynamics.

It’s a common sight on Japanese mass transit: Children troop through train cars, singly or in small groups, looking for seats.

They wear knee socks, polished patent-leather shoes, and plaid jumpers, with wide-brimmed hats fastened under the chin and train passes pinned to their backpacks. The kids are as young as 6 or 7, on their way to and from school, and there is nary a guardian in sight.

A popular television show called Hajimete no Otsukai, or My First Errand, features children as young as two or three being sent out to do a task for their family. As they tentatively make their way to the greengrocer or bakery, their progress is secretly filmed by a camera crew. The show has been running for more than 25 years.

A recent study shows that people who simply ate more fiber lost about as much weight as those who went on a complicated diet.

By this time of year, many peoples’ best-laid New Year’s Resolutions have died, just seven short weeks after they were born. One reason why it’s difficult to lose weight—the most common resolution—is that dieting is so confusing.

For instance, the American Heart Association's recommended diet is one of the most effective food plans out there. It’s also one of the most complicated. It requires, according to a recent study, “consuming vegetables and fruits; eating whole grains and high-fiber foods; eating fish twice weekly; consuming lean animal and vegetable proteins; reducing intake of sugary beverages; minimizing sugar and sodium intake; and maintaining moderate to no alcohol intake.” On top of that, adherents should derive half of their calories from carbs, a fifth from protein, and the rest from fat—except just 7 percent should be saturated fat. (Perhaps the goal is to keep people busy doing long division so they don't have time to eat food.)